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long red hair was blowing out behind her. She’d been wearing a white T-shirt, cutoff jeans and cowboy boots. He remembered the sheen of the sun on her bare browned limbs. She’d had a body that should have been illegal, at least that’s what all the young men around here said. But it had been the look on her face that he thought of now.
    “I’ve never seen anyone who lived life to the fullest as much as she did,” he said, overwhelmed for a moment by the deep sorrow he felt as he finally looked down again at her mummified corpse. “We all thought we’d see her on television or maybe in some late-night movie.” He shook his head. “But we never heard anything about her again.”
    “No one suspected she’d met with foul play?” the coroner asked.
    Frank had had a couple of theories of his own. “I thought there might have been more to the story of her disappearing like the way she did. I hadn’t been a deputy with the sheriff’s department long at that point. Maggie’s father, Flannigan McTavish, filed a missing persons report. The sheriff at the time looked into it.”
    Now he could admit to himself that he’d thought the sheriff hadn’t really investigated the case and Frank knew why. “I was worried something had happened to her, but there apparently wasn’t any evidence of foul play.”
    “Didn’t her father suspect she hadn’t run off?” Dillon asked.
    Frank put his Stetson back on his head and sighed. “Maggie McTavish was like a wild horse that had to run free. There was no corralling her. That’s why I think everyone thought she’d taken off for greener pastures or had gotten herself into trouble and had to leave. She’d apparently packed a few clothes, because they were missing along with a duffel bag,” he recalled the sheriff telling him. “That was the end of it. I think even Flannigan finally believed she’d run off.”
    “Why do I get the feeling there’s more to the story?” Dillon said, studying him.
    “There were more rumors.” He thought about those now and swore under his breath. “There was talk that Maggie had been seen with Senator John David ‘JD’ Hamilton.”
    “Senator Buckmaster Hamilton’s father?” Dillon asked in surprise.
    “The one who is now running for president,” Charlie said, nodding as if seeing where this was going.
    “The Hamilton and McTavish ranches had access to each other,” Dillon was saying. “But wasn’t JD a whole lot older—and married ?”
    Frank nodded. “He would have been about forty-two. She was eighteen. His son, Buckmaster, was older than Maggie. His wife, Grace, was confined to a wheelchair by then.”
    The undersheriff let out a low whistle. “Sounds like a scandal waiting to happen, especially with JD running for president just like his son is now. So if the rumors were true about him and this teenaged girl...”
    “He might have had to do something about it,” Charlie said, and looked down at the corpse. “While JD Hamilton’s presidential race is obviously history, Maggie turning up now seems like the worst possible time for his son, Senator Buckmaster Hamilton.”
    Frank nodded. “On top of that, I’m worried about what Flannigan McTavish will do when he finds out. There was no love lost between him and the Hamiltons even before the rumors started about Maggie and JD.”
    * * *
    “H ARPER , YOU SHOULD go home,” Brody said, needing her to leave so he could get back to the ranch. It wouldn’t take long before everyone in the county had heard about the woman’s body being found. He needed to reach his family before that happened and yet he was hesitant to leave Harper.
    The two had led their horses back to the spot where he’d been mending the fence. Neither had said much on the walk.
    Brody felt sick to his stomach. Had he not known whose body it was the moment he saw it... He struggled now with the implications and what this was going to do to his own family.
    Harper pocketed her cell phone after making a